Being And Time: Destruction

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There are three observations to note from the history of the tradition I outlined in the previous post. First, notice that the question of being was dropped somewhere along the way. Instead, the focus shifted to individual beings. Trees, rocks, animals, humans, angels and God are all beings. But what is the being of those beings?

Second, notice that in the tradition being is explained as having two distinct parts: its essence and its existence. A being’s essence is its necessary core or its qualities without which it would not be what it is. A being’s existence is the brute fact that it exists in reality rather than being an object of my imagination. For Plato, the essence of a thing is a transcendental form. Aristotle believed the essence to be a prior cause. For Descartes, the essence is an immaterial mental substance separate from the physical body.

Third, the tradition holds that beings are always something present. Heidegger points out that the Greeks “conceived [of beings] as presence” (21). In other words, we are prejudiced to think that a being cannot be something that is not (absent) but must be something that is (present). Heidegger rejects this “metaphysics of presence” to say instead that being fluctuates between presence and absence.

That probably sounds counterintuitive. Most of us privilege presence as something and absence as nothing. To help me understand this part of Heidegger’s thought, I benefited greatly from Graham Harman’s explanation. He writes:

“The being of things such as candles and trees never lies fully present before us, and neither does being itself. A thing is more than its appearance, more than its usefulness, and more than its physical body. To describe a candle or tree by referring to its outer appearance, or by concepts, is to reduce it to a caricature, since there is always something more to it than whatever we see or say. The true being of things is actually a kind of absence. A key term for Heidegger is “withdrawal”: all things withdraw from human view into a shadowy background, even when we stare directly at them. Knowledge is less like seeing than like interpretation, since things can never be directly or completely present to us” (Harman, p. 1).

The key point here is we’re in the habit of reducing things to objects of our awareness. We see the physical form of something and take that to be the whole of the being. But the full being of the thing is lost in this reduction. If we just look at a candle, we might think it’s nothing more than a wax cylinder. But when we light it more of its being is revealed to us. But I hear you say, “everyone who sees a candle already knows that it provides light.” Are you sure? Is that something you would know just by staring at it? Or did you learn it by seeing someone strike a match and using the candle in a situation where it was dark?

For Heidegger, the question of being cannot be found by thinking of forms, objects, presence, or consciousness. It’s something defined as much by its absence as by its presence, and by its context and use as by its physical form. Heidegger doesn’t see a way to salvage the assumptions we have made in the ontological tradition. Rather than clear away some philosophical brush, he plans to uproot it all:

“The question of being attains true concreteness only when we carry out the destruction (Destruktion) of the ontological tradition” (26).

Destruction here does not mean wonton vandalism. It has the goal of sweeping away bad ideas in order to uncover original ideas worth saving. This is why he introduces so many technical terms and hyphenated words. He thinks there are too many assumptions and wrong ideas about the words used in the ontological tradition. For example, “human being” presupposes the very thing under consideration. So, he will invent new words for his ontology.

Heidegger starts with the phenomena of our being. His big breakthrough is to see our being not as a separate essence and existential but as a unified whole enmeshed in the world. Much more on that later.

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